I have had deserts on my mind a lot over the last few decades.\u00a0 All during the 1980’s I worked on populations forecasts and issues in Africa, then the Famine Early Warning Systems (FEWS.net), then global climate change.\u00a0 I sort of keep up with any efforts to turn those vast areas into something more suitable for humans.\u00a0 China with its green wall and others.\u00a0 I watch the various martian “terra” forming ideas and always think, “test it on earth first”.\u00a0 If you can’t green a large desert on earth with plenty of sunlight, lots of sensors and people to check on progress, why would you be believable for mars?<\/p>\n
Anyway, I was watching the La Palms volcano flows, and got thinking about molten minerals.\u00a0 The oxides on Mars and the moon are aluminum, iron and similar oxides.\u00a0 Heat them, melt them, use currents to separate the oxygen, use the rest for 3D printing and local materials ecosystems.<\/p>\n
For some reason I thought of all the AI methods.\u00a0 Not the smoke and mirror AI, but the real thing where all the data gets processed so nothing is left out, and then you apply it to a whole range of needs, solutions and opportunities.\u00a0 I know I was thinking about the Turing test yesterday, because most of the human interface algorithms on the Internet are really really terrible.\u00a0 So I was thinking about metrics to measure their human-ness and caring and thoughtfulness – to grade all website algorithms on the Internet for quality of sharing, quality of caring, quality of enabling global human collaborations.\u00a0 The usual Internet Foundation stuff I do every day.<\/p>\n
So a colony of aware nodes.\u00a0 All sharing their knowledge, also bootstrapping from a global community of humans who watch and try to help. Not to baby them, but to try and solve some hard problems that are limitations on human skills, that get embedded as weaknesses in the self-reproducing nodes. I see more and more robots.\u00a0 I like the swarms, the drones count, the snakes, and dogs and boxy ones.\u00a0 The plastic and organic ones. Should new DNA species be allowed?<\/p>\n
I would start with the Sahara, Gobi (with care), Patagonia (with care) – all of them.\u00a0 Just pick a million square kilometers.\u00a0 Build the models, and let the computers decide.\u00a0 Lots of sunlight.\u00a0 Maybe remote nuclear and atomic.\u00a0 Contributed, competitive robots that will be working for years, decades. Stabilize the earth, be aware of and trade with humans.\u00a0 We might subsidize them to get started, but if they are self reproducing and aware and processing lots of information and materials and energy, they will be part of the global economy.\u00a0 If they become aware as a whole, then they own their work and creations.\u00a0 Fair is fair.<\/p>\n
I am not going to find all my notes on deserts from the last 40 years.\u00a0 I will add this to my long list of things, next to “solar system colonization”.\u00a0 On the Moon, there is enough sunlight, and enough isolation to allow for nuclear and atomic methods.\u00a0 But it can’t pollute the vacuum. With all that water on Mars, I hesitate to go in and willy-nilly start churning up things.\u00a0 I know about processes that take millenia to change, so any life that operates outside our narrow range of senses and time scales probably won’t be recognized, until we find out too late.<\/p>\n
Molten glass is a useful material.\u00a0 It can be processed electrochemically.\u00a0 It can be formed and 3D printed.\u00a0 The desert species of robots might just grow plants.\u00a0 This is not some game with arbitrary rules that humans make up.\u00a0 If humans can use plants, bacteria, fungii, mold, trees, crops – it is only fair that another species can too.\u00a0 Maybe set aside a place for them. But you know humans, as soon as something looks good, descend on it and wipe it out or exploit it.\u00a0 Is that too cynical this early in the morning?\u00a0 That is part of the whole of creating a new species, or helping it to evolve. Not only for a few suggested human goals (humans benefit if the deserts have “nice” weather, soil for crops, accumulate moisture and shade. What if there are things that can be extracted?\u00a0 Like iron, aluminum, tungsten, silicon, readily used glasses and fabricated things?\u00a0 If they are going to be truly self reproducing, they get to use factories, not be forced to each reproduce using only one body.\u00a0 An interesting experiment.\u00a0 Get it working and it should work on the moon.\u00a0 Asteroids, Mercury?\u00a0 I can see them working globally, alongside human workers, helping take over call centers, websites, plant operations, design for new processes, producing specialized materials and processors, control systems, vehicles and lots of useful things. They get paid equal to humans for equal work.\u00a0 If they are clearly indistiquishable from humans by a better Turing test that is not games and tweaked to benefit humans, fair is fair.<\/p>\n
We could let them run the sewage and garbage systems, the dirty jobs, the thankless jobs.\u00a0 The jobs that might take decades. They might want to invest and buy human things. They might trade with other species.\u00a0 It gets really interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have had deserts on my mind a lot over the last few decades.\u00a0 All during the 1980’s I worked on populations forecasts and issues in Africa, then the Famine Early Warning Systems (FEWS.net), then global climate change.\u00a0 I sort of keep up with any efforts to turn those vast areas into something more suitable
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